It is not easy to clearly define what kind of book Beniamino Servino writes: it depends on when you read it, depends on your mood and why you are reading it.

Because Servino needs to be read slowly. The writing of Obvius reminds me of the recent book by Jennifer Egan, Black Box, a short story written and published for the first time on Twitter. The American author (winner of the Pulitzer) had to condense each phrase, each passage into the 140 characters permitted by the social network. So Servino, through his crisp, spare writing, made up of repetitions and linguistic games, assembles fragments that he has collected over recent year on Facebook, in his diary, and gives them a different form, structures his theory.

“I don’t have [don’t use] things if I can’t adapt them to myself. Transfigure them.”

In his writing a declaration is always reinforced by another that follows in brackets, a form of linguistic richness that is rare in the fast world of social networks.

And then, “The intervention on the real (on the existing environment, city or landscape) occurs via superimposition. Levels that lie on existing ones and arrange themselves to receive others.”

The two volumes make up part of a single publishing project conceived to describe a very particular theory, to communicate an idea of architecture, made of different writings that overlay and interact with one other to give form to space. The operations carried out by Servino are very simple but they have roots that go deep into the territory and the history of places, people that live in them, social changes that pervade them. A theory that is born out of the sedimentation of the memory of a place that in various moments is overlaid with that of the architect.

The first volume defines with clarity some of the lines that are then developed in Obvius: the monumental necessity of the landscape of decay that can and must be transformed through rules. In the first book are posed the questions and themes, rules even, that return ordered and developed with clarity in the text of the second. If Monumental Need is very fragmented and with a strong anti-narrative component, Obvius is the exact opposite, it represents an arrangement of fragments, has a very clear structure, because in this theoretical enunciation the architecture takes shape. Writing and drawing enter into a dialogue.

“Writing for me is the reverse side of drawing”, declares Servino. This means that for the architect from Caserto, design is a kind of writing, a way to clarify to himself and to others the meaning of architecture.

Servino in fact, right from the title of the book and the subtitle, explains, fixes words that have the same function as the lines in his drawings, they are tracks to follow in a reasoning that acquires substance page after page.

I define fields inside of which I then move with drawing, with design. Taking care to climb over these furrows.

It has been some time since an architect tried to write a book, first and foremost for himself, and then for others, to understand and make understood that architecture gives shape to living in the world. I don’t know if the word theory is right, but this book describes and recounts the making of architecture in an original way.

To use once again the words of Servino, it is important to understand that “sometimes writing is a posteriori, other times a priori”.